The Calm Before the Storm

June 17, 2016

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As we sit here at home with the majority of our furniture having already found new homes and the children finishing their last full week at school we are very calm. We get asked how we are feeling with only days before our house sale is complete and we become nomadic. “You must be nervous?” or “I bet you are excited?” are the most frequent questions. We think briefly about it, what is the overriding emotion we are feeling at the moment? Calm. We are really very calm at the moment. Quite laid back and relaxed about the whole thing. Almost as if the magnitude of what we have decided to do has escaped us. Of course it has not escaped us. We know full well what lays ahead, but for the moment it is as if we are currently in the eye of the storm.

It started just over two years ago with a casual conversation about taking the kids out of school for long term travel. We were researching various destinations that were slightly different. From memory Greenland and Peru were a couple of these destinations. After pricing up return flights, accommodation options and the amount of time we would require from our annual leave allocation to do each place real justice, we quickly realised that it was too expensive both in monetary value and time for us to do it. It wasn’t like this with long term travel. When you are not constrained by time and can travel slowly without need to book a return flight then it opens up a whole new world of travel possibilities. We mentioned it to friends and family, who at the time thought it was a good idea but may have just believed it to be merely talk.

A year later with the idea still bouncing around in our heads we decided to pursue it. We made a plan of what we would need to do to achieve it. Questions of finance, and could we really educate the kids ourselves were asked with more meaning. A lot more research into destinations occurred and we started to clear down our debt and clutter in order to achieve our goal of long term travel with the kids.

Looking back the most excited and nervous we had been; was the moment we decided to value the house and put it on the market. We were selling our home of 10 years; the only home the kids have ever known. Putting it on the market confirmed that we were really going ahead with our plans. In the whole process it was the hardest part of it all. Friends and family realised that we were going ahead with our plans, crazy as that seemed to some of them. Fortunately for us our employers were very good about the situation and that helped the process a lot.

As the contracts exchanged on the house sale we had both finished work and made the decision to keep the kids in school until the day before the house sale completed. That gave us two weeks to sort out the house and condense our lives down to backpacks. You would think that it would be a stressful time, however this is the stage we’re in now and it’s all very serene.

That will soon change. The house sale will be complete and we will visit friends and family around the country for a week before we enter the mayhem of travel. Very soon we will no longer be in the eye of the storm and our peace will be shattered by the magical assault of sights, sounds, smells and tastes that come with travel as we fly to Sri Lanka.